Speech Accent Archive

The Speech Accent Archive has got to be useful to someone in your school. You can listen to audio files of a native speaker of a language read a passage in English. There are linguistic notes for some of the speakers describing what's happening. The site suggests the following folks might find this useful:

• ESL teachers who instruct non-native speakers of English
• Actors who need to learn an accent
• Engineers who train speech recognition machines
• Linguists who do research on foreign accent
• Phoneticians who teach phonetic transcription
• Speech pathologists
• Anyone who finds foreign accent to be interesting

I am using it to improve my Scottish accent for when I don my kilt and walk around the house telling stories of the founder of clan Gunn, Olaf the Black.

[Image: The Speech Accent Archive. George Mason University. 9 Oct 2007 .]